Adobe Photoshop CS3 + Camera RAW Support

Recently during a photoshoot with my brother (Michael Matthews) I used a new Canon 5D Mark ii (or Mark 2) for the shoot, and it was a great camera to play with! Now, I’m no pro in photography. I’m a professional graphic designer and web/multimedia pro, but I’ve still got an eye for lighting, composition, and getting the shot I need to compile some nifty graphics. So we went out and shot him in front of a green screen since he’s a great photographer and has all his own gear. (Michael’s photography website)

After shooting over 300 or so photos, I figured I had the right shots in there and could use them to create some new graphics for his website. When I got to my studio to start working –and after an hour of updating– I couldn’t load any of the .CR2 raw files from the camera into Adobe Photoshop! Yes, I was surprised since I thought Adobe would already read these files.

After doing some research, I figured out Adobe does support these files, I just needed to update. So I began to download the new RAW plug-in by Adobe. Didn’t work. I tried another plug-in. Didn’t work again! I saw my brother open these files without a problem on his machine, so I was confused.

Doing more research, I found out Adobe Photoshop CS3 does NOT support these new files from Canon. Even after updating the Camera Raw Plug-in 4.6 (the 5.3 plug-in won’t work on CS3, it is only for Lightroom 2  and Photoshop CS4) it wouldn’t load. So I figured out that I had to use the latest DNG converter to convert the RAW file to read in Photoshop CS3.

After spendnig another hour of researching all this, it was a breeze to work with. Just posting this information up hoping that it might help others quicker than taking nearly an hour of testing and googling the web.

Keep up the work!